An enhanced interval-valued PM2.5 concentration forecasting model with attention-based feature extraction and self-adaptive combination technology

Accurate predictions of air quality enable governments and relevant authorities to take promptly measures for protecting public health. With the increasing time-varying nature of air pollutants, predicting daily average concentrations alone is no longer sufficient for environmental management and risk warning. Hence, this paper proposes a multi-resolution interval-valued PM_2.5 concentration combination prediction model, which based on interval decomposition and attention mechanism reconstruction. Firstly, the interval-valued time series (ITS) was decomposed and adaptively reconstructed using the binary empirical mode decomposition (BEMD) algorithm and attention-based reconstruction. Subsequently, multi-resolution linear projection layers were applied to extract temporal features from the time series. Finally, a hybrid prediction module was implemented that combines CNN and LSTM to predict each subsequence and integrate them to derive the final interval prediction values for PM2.5. In the proposed framework, the reconstruction technique effectively resolved the issue of inconsistent numbers of different feature decomposition subsequences, while the linear projection layer fully captured the multi-resolution characteristics of the time series. Empirical studies conducted in three districts of Beijing showed that, compared to state-of-the-art baseline models, the framework reduced the average values of five interval evaluation metrics by 11.2%, 17.4%, 11.7%, 10.5%, and 14.8%, respectively. This interval-valued prediction framework can effectively assist urban air quality management and warning.